Letting Go As A Spiritual Practice October 22, 2008

There’s no way around it. Life is a constant flow of beginnings and endings. We humans have a way of welcoming and celebrating beginnings: births, getting the job, getting the man, buying the home. Graduations aside, we have a much lower opinion of endings: death, divorce, being fired.

We find something and we feel blessed. We lose something, we feel cursed. We try to clear the clutter and find our new mantra is “I might need that some day”. We stubbornly cling to people, things and stories that no longer serve us.

Begin to think of letting go and saying good-bye as a spiritual practice. When you clean a closet and fill boxes for the thrift store – you are practicing the fine art of conscious dying. Be aware of your feelings as you release roles, objects and relationships that have defined you. You are becoming fearless and showing the Universe that you trust.

Yogic teaching tells us that all our spiritual practice in life is to give us one chance at a conscious death. Gandhi died as he lived. In the face of his assassin, with no time whatsoever to think, uttered Hey Ram as he was being shot. In doing so, he blessed his killer with forgiveness and himself with the conscious death he had prepared for all his life. **

“To die is an art. Everything on this planet, every act is done so that dying may be graceful. All knowledge of spirituality is to mend one thing only – that when we die, we die in grace, without fear, without vengeance, without desire. We should just love to die, that moment…at that moment, everything is decided.”